Yara (2021): An Unfocused True Crime Narrative
The trouble with Yara (2021) is that in its attempt to tell the whole story, it struggles to tell a consistently engaging story.

John Eliot Gardiner conducts the Orchestra of the Opéra National de Lyon in this 1987 production of Claude Debussy’s opera of jealously and love denied, “Pelléas et Mélisande”, starring Colette Alliot-Lugaz and François Le Roux in the lead roles. The production places the story in vast gloomy castle halls, a sparse but atmospheric environment that only adds to the opera’s sense of dark beauty entangled with doom.
The trouble with Yara (2021) is that in its attempt to tell the whole story, it struggles to tell a consistently engaging story.
A complex, realistic, and loving mother-daughter relationship is at the heart of this story about Black pageants and the fight for a better future.
As Sexual Assault Awareness Month comes to an end, I’d like to urge viewers and filmmakers to take a long and hard look at how rape is portrayed on screen.
In The Novelist's Film, Hong explores the meaningful things people share and inspire by virtue of simply engaging with one another.
I suppose you could argue that the story wasn’t what Director James Cameron was aiming for, it was the visuals. The spectacle of it all was the point, and it certainly shows.